


I tried not to throw stones

by whendocloudssleep



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Self Harm, Suicide Attempt, vague pedophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:58:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whendocloudssleep/pseuds/whendocloudssleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jess Mariano is 12 and he hates himself, 15 and he hates his mother more, and when 18 finally rolls over he’s stuck in a too small town filled with too many large people and the only thing he didn’t hate about it ran away from him and this mimicry of a town.</p>
<p>(And just for that, he thinks he hates her too.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I tried not to throw stones

**Author's Note:**

> So I have a ton of sad headcanons about Jess Mariano, and once upon a time I wrote about a few of them.

Jess Mariano is 12 and he hates himself, 15 and he hates his mother more, and when 18 finally rolls over he’s stuck in a too small town filled with too many large people and the only thing he didn’t hate about it ran away from him and this mimicry of a town.

(And just for that, he thinks he hates her too.)

He’s twelve and while this time it may not be his mother’s hands leaving the bruises that he hides so perfectly, her hands aren’t stopping them either and she won’t be there to press a kiss into his hair and wipe at his always too dry face and tell him things will be okay. No, that’s weeks from now when her latest boyfriend or husband gives up on Liz’s money or gets tired of sneaking into Jess’ room at night or finally drinks himself into the middle of traffic. You would think that in New York even a drunk man could stay out of the middle of the street.

His mother will blame him again because it’s always his fault, and if he starts to believe her again this time, well, that would be par for the course.

At fifteen, the line gets crossed and Jess decides that he’s done. (It’s the first time but it won’t be the last.) So he stuffs the pills into his mouth, a handful of things that Liz has been taken to the hospital for in the past and settles in on his bed.

When he wakes he thinks that he should have made it more permanent. They’ve pumped his stomach, he can tell, and there’s an IV in his arm, Uncle Luke in a chair by the bed. That alone lets him know how bad it is. Luke hates his sister. Or he doesn’t hate her, but he hates her life and with Liz there’s very little difference.

Luke doesn’t say anything when he notices that Jess has woken up, but Liz walks in, clean and sober and if he didn’t know better he wouldn’t be able to guess that she had fallen asleep in their stairwell just last week.

 

(But he does know better, and she’s always been this way, so he’s placing his bets on maybe 3 weeks before she’s back to her old self.)

(He would have lost if there had been money laid down. She makes it a month. He celebrates her extra week of sobriety by getting so drunk that he doesn’t remember getting his tattoos.)

Against all odds he makes it to sixteen, to seventeen, to his mother getting tired of dealing with him, and dealing with the life that he lives, that she lives, that he is so very, very tired of living, and so she ships him off. She sends him to live with his uncle who he hasn’t seen since that first time in the hospital, since before the cut wrists and the bruises on his neck that he once again didn’t put there.

In this town that he hates, with these people that he can’t stand there is one good thing, one single thing that makes him not want to drown in that incredibly shallow lake.

There’s a girl. And there are always girls but this one is different, because she may not care but she doesn’t hate him like everyone else, doesn’t get angry when he steals her book and vandalizes it.

(Maybe that says more about him than anything else in his life. He took her book and wrote his thoughts in it and then gave it back to her, because he needed her to read them. He needed her to think about what he had added, about the way he thinks, about him.)

But she’s got a boyfriend, and she doesn’t want to give him up, and he trails around behind her like the giant golden retriever that he is, and everyone thinks that Jess Mariano is the devil and is going to ruin their precious girl.

She sees the scars on his wrists and it bothers her. Her boyfriend sees the scars on his wrists and he will not hide them with his sleeves. Her boyfriend will deal with the fact that not only are his words saying that he doesn’t want to be here, but his body says it too.

Jess works and pours coffee and lets everyone else hate him, and lets her smile and melt everything else away as they have lunch on a bridge and she doesn’t say anything about the lines on his wrists or the ink under his skin or anything that he has shown her.

Then there’s a night where he needs cones and she tells him to keep driving and things are happening too fast and he smokes his entire pack of cigarettes that night on the bridge and is gone before the next time the girl needs coffee.

But she acts like him and skips school and tracks him down and they have a great day, and he just wants to take her to his home and hide her away and not let her leave because she could shine here, could do wonderful things.

Instead he lets her go home, lets her leave, lets her say goodbye and get her peace of mind, before she sticks him in a folder titled what could have been that she will pull out in a few years when Luke tells her that his crazy-haired nephew finally, finally, got out.

So he doesn’t sleep. He reads through all of the books that he owns, and he works, and he camps in the library until it closes and then he takes too many books home and brings them back too quickly.

The city isn’t too loud, but the noises are wrong and so he calls his uncle, asks if he can come back, and Luke, for the grace of God and all of the luck in Jess’ body and the love that he can feel there but will never admit to, says that he can come back.

And he surprises her. She’s walking with her father who is walking away on the phone when she sees him. He just wanted to come back, isn’t going to say that it was her, all her, because this isn’t a novel and things aren’t perfect now. He’s not the hero but she is the heroine, and she kisses him and he kisses back and picks up the role that he left off and is the villain again.

Then she’s saying not to tell anyone and he can’t think of anything because she’s running away and he may not have had to watch her bus roll away in New York because he had been the one to walk away but he had felt it and he feels it again.

And he stands there and feels that love grow into hate, grow into something of the two that is so mixed together that he’s sure he’s never going to be rid of it and he smiles and his face is still too dry and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel only that he misses the control that you have when you’re the one that’s walking away.


End file.
